The emergence of both Internet 2 and pay-per-view documents will change significantly the cost structure for information resources.

At present, Internet costs and library information costs are predominantly fixed costs that can be predictably budgeted within normal annual cycles. In the future, information costs will be increasingly controlled by the decisions of individual users over which sites to visit and when premium bandwidth may be needed for video-conferencing or other media-intense tasks. Operating costs can rise out of control as students and faculty shift their research and study behaviors.

One solution might be to transition to a practice of billing each user for information access in a manner similar to the current practice of billing for long-distance telephone calls.

• What infrastructure changes might be needed to implement this?
• What types of new department budget structures will need to be invented?
• How will this impact the ideals of a "free library"?